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Working Paper No. 318 Working Paper No. 318 Origins of the GATT - British Resistance to American Multilateralism by James N. Miller Cambridge University Visiting Scholar, Jerome Levy Economics Institute at Bard College 2000 INTRODUCTION Research Program Just over fifty years after its precarious launch as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the World Trade Organization (WTO) has grown into the most potent symbol of globalization. The raucous events at the launch of the Millennium Round of Trade Negotiations in Seattle confirmed this perception. But few activists on any side of the trade issue in Seattle recognized the historical irony inherent in the WTO's current status: while today it is a symbol of integration and free trade, it began as an apparent failure of international cooperation. Planned while bitter fighting still raged around the world, the International Trade Organization (ITO) was intended to form the third leg of the post-war international economic arrangements, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). Largely because of political division within the United States that resulted from the compromises embedded in the institution and its Charter, the ITO was never established.(1) The free trade agenda was forced to balance on a thin branch - the provisional GATT. The GATT was signed in 1947 as an interim, voluntary agreement. Its signatories intended the ITO to subsume and finalize the GATT in the ITO negotiations scheduled for Havana in 1948. When it became apparent that it had failed, the ITO's architects cast a despondent glance toward the GATT. With no formal institutional structure and very little publicity, the GATT persisted in making a revolutionary demand upon the nation-state - it must perpetually relinquish its sovereign right to raise tariff rates. The endurance of an international regime on such a basis, for so long, is without precedent. Why have members of the GATT / WTO system continued to cooperate? Is there anything in the substance and form of this institution itself that has enabled it to endure and strengthen over time, while other multilateral regimes have crumbled or weakened? A central part of this paper is to first, uncover the negotiating history of the GATT by investigating hitherto unexamined archival material, and reconsider the historical and political context that gave rise to the Agreement. Second, it seeks to distill the important features of the re-invigorated GATT / WTO that were both present at its origins and have contributed to its durability. The First Postwar Negotiation Bouncing in a rickety military C-47 "with bucketseats like barrels", Will Clayton and Emilio Collado flew out of Potsdam on a Sunday in late August, 1947. After an exhausting trip, they finally arrived in London. Clayton, the American Under Secretary of State for Foreign Economic Policy, and Collado, his advisor, prepared to meet on Monday with British officials Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps and John Maynard Keynes - respectively the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the President of the Board of Trade, and a prominent economist working in the Treasury Department. Monday, however, was "one of those so-called bank holidays", and unfortunately "no one but Keynes was willing to meet [them] to discuss the rehabilitation of the nation on a bank holiday!"(2) The Japanese had just surrendered and, though still elated, Clayton and Collado "were horrified to hear of the action taken over the weekend in Washington to cut off Lend-Lease." Truman had indeed terminated Lend-Lease abruptly on August 21, 1945. Clayton immediately phoned Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes in Washington, DC. Although he was famous for his even temper and uncommon self-control, Clayton was furious with Byrnes. The British were also shocked and angry. Hugh Dalton soon arrived with Lord Brand from the British Treasury. Dalton exclaimed: "What's the use of sitting here talking to you about what will happen when suddenly we learn from Washington what you're really doing!" Fortunately, Clayton and Brand knew each other from when Brand served as British Treasury Representative in Washington. "The British were terribly upset, and this showed how close [Clayton] was to Brand, for together they bound up the hurts."(3) Two high-ranking, economic civil servants mobilized their friendship to mend diplomatic fences at a tense moment. Like millions of others, from Roosevelt and Churchill through to American soldiers and British civilians, they forged a tight bond during war. Elite policymakers from both nations, many of whom had recently emigrated from business and academia to join the government, found themselves working particularly closely with their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. Both Clayton and Brand had been involved in postwar planning for several years. Clayton had played an important role in an official planning process that American Secretary of State Cordell Hull first formally launched shortly after war broke out in September of 1939.(4) Soon 'postwar planning' came to occupy a significant minority of the State Department's human resources. The Cabinet, the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and various other public and private institutions also eventually became involved. A comparable effort in Britain did not materialize until several years later. While the Americans worked assiduously and deliberately to map out their ideal postwar order, the British concentrated on survival. Nonetheless, the two countries' interests in the postwar system first came into conflict in August of 1941when Churchill and Roosevelt met to devise the Atlantic Charter. The Placentia Bay meeting became the first of many such Anglo-American encounters, where officials deliberated postwar policy commitments. For precisely four years following the August 14 signing of the Atlantic Charter, the British and the Americans made various official promises to one another about postwar trade policy,(5) through several 'informal' discussions and seminars. Then the sudden surrender of the Japanese on August 14, 1945 shocked even leading planners like Will Clayton. The planning was over; the postwar world had arrived. With the cancellation of Lend-Lease, Britain found itself in dire financial straits. It had an export industry crippled by war and by the limitations imposed under the Lend-Lease agreement, a deficit of five billion dollars on its international account, and pressure on sterling stemming from cumbersome debts to members of the Sterling Bloc. Britain looked urgently to the US for a loan. With the World Bank and IMF already successfully negotiated, both countries also sensed a critical need to lead the world toward the re-establishment of normal trading relations. They aimed to institute the planned ITO. Thus Clayton, Cripps and other officials in London hurriedly prepared to launch formal talks on both financial aid to Britain and the structure of the postwar trading system. They scheduled a start date one month later in Washington, DC. Finally, after more than six years of planning on the American side and four years of bilateral deliberation, the first formal, postwar negotiations to establish an international commercial policy regime finally commenced on October 1, 1945. British Resistance For two months in Washington, officials from the British Treasury, Board of Trade and Foreign Office, led by Sir Percivale Liesching and Lord Keynes, negotiated the commercial policy provisions with officials from the American Departments of State and Treasury. Will Clayton and Harry Hawkins, Chief of the Commercial Policy Division and Agreements, led the State Department contingent. Fred Vinson, Secretary of the Treasury, and Harry Dexter White, who had played such a significant role at the Bretton Woods negotiations, concentrated more on the loan negotiations as leading Treasury representatives. In August of 1945, the American economy was providing more than half of the world's entire output. Arguably, the United States had attained the highest relative level of military, political and economic power it had ever possessed, or ever would again. Britain's economy was in crisis. Keynes circulated a memo on August 13 in which he listed the three main sources of financial assistance upon which the British had depended in order to wage war. Lend-Lease from the United Sates, Mutual Aid from Canada, and credits from the Sterling Area countries had enabled Britain to fight without having to increase exports to pay for food and raw materials needed at home, or to furnish the cash they spent abroad.(6) Thus, as the war suddenly finished, the new Labor Government faced a "predicament unique in British peacetime history": national bankruptcy, "yet imperial world commitments at their grandest and most costly ever."(7) In addition, they faced American negotiators who seemed intent to exploit the British need for financial aid in order to gain adherence to State Department plans for the postwar trading regime.(8) As Prime Minister Clement Attlee succinctly described the situation: "We weren't in a position to bargain."(9) They bargained, however, very successfully. They went to Washington to negotiate the recently completed 'Draft Proposal to Establish an International Trade Organization', composed by the Americans, based upon the wartime discussions. The British left Washington having transformed the 'Washington Proposals ' so significantly that each major issue came to represent their interest in a more
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